This project started as an assignment for CS 407-'Foundations of Mobile Systems and Applications'. Campus Exchange is a cross-platform app that acts as a mobile marketplace for UW-Madison students to facilitate the buying and selling of Housing, Textbooks and Tickets.

Problem

UW-Madison students have 3 types of goods they try to exchange: Housing, Textbooks and athletic/concert Tickets. Before Campus Exchange the only way to do this was through three separate Facebook pages. This fragmented market led to many problems, including spam notifications, checking multiple pages, a difficult messaging process and lack of search functionality.

Inspiration

I was extremely motivated to solve this problem since it was one that I had to deal with on almost a weekly basis. My friend Christian Kaczmarczyk had approached me and a few guys the year before to work on an app called 'FlipTix' that could facilitate exchanges of tickets. We pounded out a demo for the Startup Warzone Hackathon. However, I felt it was a little feature-heavy and that it could be expanded to allow exchanging of other types of items.

Mobile app called 'Fliptix' we created for Startup Warzone hackathon last year.

Solution

We opted for a simple and straight forward mobile app that would allow students to facilitate the exchange of these 3 types of items in one place. Each type of item had it's own page where users could scroll through posts. The biggest improvements were: allowing for direct messaging through Facebook & SMS and adding text search along with price filters.

Results

One of the posters we used for Marketing around campus (Jake Dexheimer design)

Downloads: 60

App store(s) views: 2,293

Google Ads impressions: 791

Revenue from ads: $7.47

Project Grade: A :)

Team

Ben Webster: An extremely talented software developer originally from Southern California, Ben took on the lion's share of the coding for this project. I pushed for using the Ionic Framework and Ben hopped on board and learned from scratch. Having completed his CS degree Ben now does software contracting out in California.